The Middle Eastern And Mediterranean After-Life Conception

The cessation of the personality with bodily death.

"(Better) to serve as the hireling of another,
of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, than to be lord
over all the dead that have perished."

Homeric Pessimism

In contrast to the optimism of the Egyptians, the majority of civilisations
that developed in and around the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East
in the centuries before Christ took a dim and pessimistic view.
The ancient Babylonians, Hebrews, and Homeric Greeks (by "Homeric" is meant
the viewpoint of the great poet Homer 8th century B.C.E.) and his public),
saw the after-life state - the Underworld, Sheol, Hades - as a dark, miserable,
quasi-existence; the dead being but a pathetic shadow of their former living
selves.

A graphic literary illustration of this is given in Homer's account
of the meeting of Odysseus with the shade of Achilles, the greatest
and most renowned of all the Greek heros. Odysseus, descending to
Hades in order to consult the dead seer Teiresias concerning the
circumstances that prevented him from returning home, encounters Achilles,
and congratulates him regarding the honors and fame he had won through
his part in the siege of Troy. Achilles rejects Odysseus' words with
a devastating reply:

"Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death....I
should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another,
of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to
be lord over all the dead that have perished."
[S. G. F. Brandon, The Judgment of the Dead, p.82 (Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, London, 1967)]

In a society which saw martial glory and honours as the highest of
all values, even that is not compensation for the miserable state of after-life
existence. Better to be the most pathetic beggar alive than the King
of all the Underworld. What a contrast to the magnificent and multi-faceted
Egyptian afterlife!

The Conception Of The Soul As Breath

According to the Old Testament Hebrews, man
was a kind of holistic unity
of body and soul; there was no conception of a soul separate from
the body, as the Egyptians and the Greek
Platonists had.
After death the body returns to the earth, and the life - the
ruah or breath breathed into Adam's nostrils by God - returns to
God. Thus the "soul" is identified with the life of the body,
and the life with the breath (nefesh, ruah); an idea that
survives in the modern expression "breath of life".

Nor was this belief confined to the people of the Old Testament.
It formed an essential part of the entire Middle Eastern and Meditteranean
religious and cultural milieu. G. A. Barton, in his article in Hasting's
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, tells us that

And we see this identification not only among the Semites of the Middle
East. Consider the Greek word pnuema ("air", "spirit")
and the Latin spiritus, from which latter we derive the English
"spirit" and "inspiration" (literally "to breath in"). Even
that classical word for the soul, psyche, can be related to psychein
= to breath [Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind, p.270 (1976, Penguin Books)].

In the Indian and Tibetan traditions there can likewise be found reference
to Prana (breath or vital force) and Vayu (air or wind, equated
in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism
with Prana), and the nature and yogic activation of this life/breath principle
was explained in great detail. The Chinese also had a great deal
to say regarding the Ch'i or vital-force, its various modes and
currents. But unlike their less perceptive Mediterranean brethren,
whose formulations of ruah, nefesh, psyche, and spiritus all confuse
(a) physical air or breath, (b) vital
force, and (c) mind or psyche or soul,
the Far Eastern yogis and occultists consistantly recognised Prana, Vayu,
and Ch'i as constituting a principle distinct from the mind or soul.
It was only later that there appeared in the West a similar recognition
of the distinction between life-principle and soul.

Man - A Holistic Being Dependent On The Physical Body

The common Mediterranean perspective therefore was that man is a holistic
unity of body and soul or life-principle, and death of the body therefore
meant death of the personality as well. For Homer and his readers,
man is regarded as being made up of three parts: the body,
the psyche (life-principle), and the thymos (conscious self).
With the dissolution of the body, the thymos was merged with the air, and
the psyche descended into Hades as a shade or ghost, the eidolon
("image").

Later, as with the Hebrew nefesh and ruah - both
of which terms, as we have seen, originally meant "breath", or "soul
as the breath of life", and later came to mean "(immortal) soul"
- the psyche became the conscious principle or "soul". As for
the eidolon or "image", I will have more to say concerning this later.

The post-Homeric Hellenic thinkers polarised into two distinct camps
when it came to explaining whether or not consciousness continued after
death.

On the one hand there were the sages and mystics, such as the Orphics,
Pythagoras and his students and followers (the Pythagoreans), Empedocles,
and Plato and his students and successors (the Platonists), who all
held that the conscious principle or soul (psyche) was an immortal
spiritual essence, and transmigrated from body to body.

On the other hand there were the more mundane and pragmatic, this-worldly
philosophers and thinkers, such as Aristotle and his successors (the Peripatetics),
Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and Epicurus and his followers (the Epicurians),
who held with Homer that consciousness or intellect is only possible whilst
the physical body continues to function. The Stoics For example were
of the opinion, much in the manner of the modern physicist, that fire (=energy)
was the fundamental principle of the universe. According to
them, after death the soul

"decomposes along with the physical body and returns
to...the ether....(The) higher elements in man, such as the Fire
of Reason,...also dissolves back into its universal source, leaving no
individuality to experience any posthumous state..."
[Jocyln Godwin, Mystery Religions, p.70]

Here we see of course a repeat of the Homeric and Hebraic position,
according to both of which bodily death means the return of the component
personality aspects to their respective sources.

Origin Of The Belief In Resurrection

For the most part, the Babylonians, Hebrews, Homeric Greeks, Stoics, and
Epicurians, like modern materialists
and sceptics, nobly accepted
their lot. Indeed, we even have the expression "Stoic acceptance".
But it is a natural consequence of the strivings of the human spirit
that it could not be satisfied with a such a limited existence.

Consider the ancient Hebrews. Their henotheistic
/ monotheistic Yahweh cult induced
in them a strong sense of morals and justice, as indicated by the Mosaic
Ten Commandments. And their god was very much a god of justice, even
if this was originally and unfortunately only the crude vengeance
of a tribe of savage desert warriors. But under reformers like the
prophet Isaiah (8th century B.C.E.), this brutal Yahweh was replaced by
a more morally elevated Yahweh, perhaps the first expression of "God"
as the term is understood today. Yet all the while the problem remained:
how can one speak of righteousness and justice when we have all around
us the evidence that the wicked flourish and the good go to their graves
unrewarded? It was through pondering questions like this that the
problem of theodicy, the paradox between Divine Justice and the existence
of evil, came into human consciousness.

The Hebrews eventually solved this problem the only way they knew
how. If good and evil are not rewarded or punished by God
during this life, it follows that there must be a post-mortem existence
where they are. The shadowy existence in Sheol must therefore
be replaced by something fuller.

Thus the later Hebrews, who had come into contact with Persian-Zoroastrian
beliefs during their Babylonian Exile (6th Century B.C.E.), adopted the
Zoroastrian idea of bodily resurrection. In the Judeo-Christian tradition,
this first clearly appears in the Book of Daniel (173 B.C.E.). The
reason for the popular appeal of the Resurrection belief is obvious: granted
that the personality or consciousness depends for its existence on the
body, if there was some miraculous way the body could be restored,
the personality and individual existence would also be restored.
The hope of a supernatural resurrection provided this.

Thus we can see that the entire Judeo-Christian emphasis on the "resurrection",
and the Christian idea of Christ's
resurrection as the guarantee for "eternal life", is based in very large
measure on the inability to comprehend any after-life existence apart from
the physical body.

The Zoroastrians and Jews therefore,
and following the latter the Christians
and Moslems, got around the problem
of personality disintegration with bodily death by constructing a myth,
a sort of fairy tale, which said, "Yes, it is true that your body
will die and your consciousness cease. But if you believe in our
religion there will come eventually a miraculous moment when your physical
body and therefore your consciousness and personality as well,
will be restored, and you will live in a paradise on Earth."

But this is, after all, only a fairy tale. For if the body
has decayed and long since become dust, how can all the scattered elements
possibly come together again? There comes a time, when faith becomes
too absurd, when one must take a more realistic look at things.
And here we can consider once again those extraordinary Egyptians.

Unlike the believers in the bodily resurrection myth, the Egyptians
had valid occult knowledge; knowledge which the Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks,
Christians and modern materialists lacked or lack.

The Egyptians had the idea that it is society (the religious community,
family, etc) that should safeguard the deceased's continued personal afterlife
existence. Hence the great emphasis they placed on mummification,
funerary rites, providing for the welfare the deceased, and so on.
Along with this there were presumably also various initiation rites,
whereby the individual while still living was put in touch with the spiritual-Divine
realities that would guide him or her to the heaven worlds or the
enlightened state after death. Such initiation was also a central
part of Mithraism, Tantric Buddhism,
and the Anthroposophy of Rudolph
Steiner.

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